The service provider (SP) market has moved up the value chain from pure connectivity services to deliver value-added and revenue generating services. The business model of a service provider, which was initially driven by minutes of use, is being increasingly replaced by data traffic generated by users that access external services through an increasing variety of devices. In addition to growing their customer bases, service providers are now looking to increase the average revenue per user to boost revenues. More compelling services such as content, commerce, and applications promise higher profit margins, improved customer retention, and greater customer satisfaction. However, managing and distributing these third-party content services present significant challenges to service providers.
At the same time, content providers (CPs) are quickly becoming experts in digitally managing and distributing their content, but still face the challenge of establishing independent relationships with end users. To successfully generate revenue through digital content assets, both service and content providers need a solution that leverages their complementary strengths while protecting their respective assets.
In this context, emerging Web Services technologies will play a key role in the management of the Business to Business (B2B) relationship between the SPs and CPs. As the Web did for program-to-user interactions, Web Services will do for program-to-program interactions. Web Services allow companies to reduce the cost of doing e-business, to deploy solutions faster, and to open up new opportunities. The key to reaching this new horizon is a common program-to-program communications model, built on existing and emerging standards such as HTTP, eXtensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI). Web Services allow applications to be integrated more rapidly, easily, and less expensively than ever before. They provide a unifying programming model so that application integration inside and outside the enterprise can be done with a common approach.
In today's market, a service provider generally aggregates content from multiple content providers and therefore multiplies its partnerships with CPs. In order to ease integration with these different CPs, the SP delegates an increasing number of authentication and authorization tasks to the CPs.
These tasks could be done in different ways:
                no authentication process is done by the CPs site to deliver its content to the SP. However, this business model does not seem to be very realistic.        a user registry is available on the CP sites which implies that the CPs need to build and maintain their own subscriber registry. On one hand, this solution increases the amount of business process on the CP side and therefore cost, and on the other hand, either the SP has to deliver protected or confidential data about the subscribers, which might not be part of its business policy, or the user has to be registered on both sides, SP and CP, which might not be convenient for the end-user.        